The human brain has always needed silence, and there have always been people who needed solitude, at least for certain periods

Some years ago, I was asked to mind a house in inner Melbourne, so for weeks I rattled around in a boom-period mansion of 11 large rooms. Nervous at night, I took myself in hand: 'They've got to find me first,' I told myself when thinking of would-be intruders.

The other reason for nerves was the noise level: in the Greek village house I had been without a phone for ten years, and the most common sounds were those of donkeys sobbing in the olive groves and tractors grinding along the street.

In the Melbourne house there were numerous phones, so that I never knew which one to answer. There were also machines that I was ignorant of, but which emitted noise very regularly: the air conditioner, various exhaust fans, the enormous freezer, the fax machine, the intercom, the house alarm. The whole building gave out a constant hum, even in the days before the computer ping of email.

I realised then that I had spent a quiet childhood: in the country township we had no car, no refrigerator, little background noise apart from birdsong. When we listened to the wireless it was with a purpose, for a particular program. As for other noise, we made our own when the spirit moved us: piano, violin, our singing voices. In between we had our quiet interludes: sometimes my mother would demand what she called 'a drop of hush'.

The human brain has always needed silence, and there have always been people who needed solitude, at least for certain periods. In 1948 war hero and adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor retreated to a French monastery simply in order to write. But the experience of silence was an unexpected bonus.

At first he found it simply depressing, and was prey to terrible feelings of loneliness and flatness. But eventually freed from what he termed the 'automatic drains' of talk, movement and nervous expression, he found a unique and restorative freedom that enabled him to work and eventually produce A Time To Keep Silence.

Life was simpler then. Now, as well as other sources of noise, we have what British-American writer and self-confessed web freak Andrew Sullivan calls 'online clamour' to contend with. In 2016, fearing a breakdown as a result of what he terms living in the web, and apparently doing little else in the way of living, Sullivan booked himself into a retreat, which involved separation from his iPhone, and the subsequent withdrawal pangs.

But like Fermor decades before, Sullivan soon began to appreciate the experience. He contends that his obsession had been leading him to lose his humanity. Freeing himself from the web was hard work, but very much worth the effort: he began to draw closer to the natural world, and had no mediating iPhone to capture the images of light on leaves or the birds whose songs he was genuinely listening to at last. He, too, began to see the positive in the deepening silence that enveloped him during this restorative time, and felt freed from the tyranny of 'doing'.

Sullivan is a practising Catholic, and began to think rather more about the place of silence in our lives, which has been much harder to achieve since 'the roar and disruption of the Industrial Revolution'. He considered silence in spaces like libraries and churches, and the way in which Christ was often silent: he did not defend himself when he could have done, for example. Sullivan comes to a conclusion that I found surprising, but also logical: hedonism is not the enemy of faith, distraction is. In fact, he asserts, distraction is a threat to our souls.

Nor can we blame science and scientists' attempts to disprove the unprovable for the diminution of faith in our culture. Faith, he maintains, needs stillness and silence in order to endure or be reborn. But today that stillness and silence is being constantly challenged by 'the white noise of secularism'. I suppose the moral of Sullivan's story is that we all need to slow down and use all our senses, since the irony is that the urge to be continually connected actually disconnects us from 'real' life. Sometimes we need to stop and smell the roses. And switch off our phones.

Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.

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